New scene | Yan Dongfang: one-eighth of an iceberg

One in eight icebergs

——The explicit and implicit nature of gender discourse in Sun Pin's creation

□ Yan Dongfang

One

Sun Pin's early creations can easily be attributed to the sequence of women's literature, focusing on the distinct female figure, the writing of gender issues, the cold and glamorous style of words, the female perspective... These creative characteristics are important reasons for critics to identify their feminine characteristics. It is also because of these characteristics that Sun Pin's creation is often compared with Zhang Ailing's creation, of which "desolation" has become an important word for critics to connect the two. The problem with this kind of identification is that it is only judged that the creation of female writers belongs to the female literary sequence based on the characteristics of character image, subject matter, language style, female perspective, etc., ignoring the complexity of the operation of gender discourse in creation. If the definition of character image, subject matter, and language style still has a certain certainty, then the female perspective is somewhat ambiguous, and whether the so-called female perspective is mixed with the male gaze is a question that has never been asked.

When Sun Pin reviewed his reading history, in addition to Wang Anyi, Tie Ning, Fan Xiaoqing and others, Lin Bai and Chen Yan were also prominently listed. However, immediately after, she further clarified that post-50s female writers have a greater influence on themselves. [1] If the intergenerational line is used as the dividing line, in this sequence, Lin Bai's intergenerational sense is obviously different from Wang Anyi, Tie Ning, Fan Xiaoqing and others, while Chen Yan is directly excluded from the post-50s female writer group. The most significant difference between the post-50s female writers in this sequence of Lin Bai, Chen Yan and Wang Anyi is that they are often referred to as representatives of "personalized" writing, while Wang Anyi and others, although they are also good at writing specific people, always write in a grand social and historical structure. In Zhang Li's gender view survey, Sun Pin also raised his own questions about the so-called female voice and female liberation of "women's private novels" to "Shanghai Baby". [2] With such caution and repeated interpretation, Sun Pin may have avoided associating his creation with stigmatized female writing, especially "body writing".

But the problem is that the so-called gender experience is first and foremost a physical experience, and the body, as a material intermediary between the individual and the world, cannot be circumvented in any way. Sun Pin's body in his early writing is so shocking, the image of a prostitute reappears in novels such as "The Invisible Woman" and "The Uninvited Guest", the phenomenon of pulling deviations appears many times in novels such as "Half Face Makeup", "No Phase", and "MoonLight"[3], and Chen Fenyuan's inner world revealed in exaggerated costumes in "Ling Bodu"... Both point directly to women's physical problems. So, under the reflection on women's writing in the 1990s, how does Sun Pin write about the body? Does the repetition of the image of a prostitute mean that the female writer has not yet departed from the female physical meaning of the male gaze at the time of the construction of the self-subject? The question that follows is whether female writers have no resistance to the male gaze?

Once these questions were raised, "The Uninvited Guest" was particularly important in Sun Pin's early creations. The heroine of the novel, Ji Miping, is a low-level prostitute in the city, and the important principle she pursues is to insist on not kissing men in the sex trade, as a sign of self-recognition of her purity. In Su Xiaojun's refusal, Ji Miping knocked on his door again and again. In the article at the graduate level, the author's research only notes that Ji Miping's actions are feedback on Su Xiaojun's actions, and believes that the actions of many female protagonists in Sun Pin's early creations are actually led by men, but they fail to understand that characters like Ji Miping, although they also respond to male actions, are full of rebellion against male will. [4] Moreover, although the novel ends with Su Xiaojun calling back Ji Miping, it is Ji Miping's wishes that are achieved.

The deeper meaning of Ji Miping's self-belief in purity and rebellion against Su Xiaojun's will can be understood in Chizuru Ueno's interpretation of "the misogyny of men who like women". She pointed out that the essence of this misogyny is that "their liking is not to love prostitutes as human beings, but to play with and control the women they buy with money, so that they even involuntarily take the initiative to obey themselves." Similar to Nagai, although he was willing to please prostitutes, he never gave up the strict boundaries of class and gender. [5] It is in the sense of rebelling against the male will, attaining the will of the self, and rebelling against one's own class with purity that The Uninvited Guest presents the woman's need to know herself from the male gaze, and begins with rebellion against this gaze, moving towards the establishment of the true self.

From this, it is not difficult to understand the strong pain of Sun Pin's early creation overflowing words, and its source is the fierce struggle at the time of the construction of the subject. Reading "No Phase" from Sun Pin's series of novels full of pain, this novel seems to be different. But as far as the tension between the female individual and the body is possible and should be relaxed, the emergence of "No Phase" is inevitable. At the end of the novel, the sound of the growth of all things is drowned out in the body of guoqin, and the body is no longer the body in the male gaze, but returns to the rhythm of nature.

Two

Women can perceive themselves clearly through their bodies, but they may not necessarily establish their own value only from the perception of their bodies. After discovering himself, a serious question in front of Sun Pin is how to fill the lack of self-meaning. Obviously, it is impossible to repeat the old path of women's writing in the 1990s, and perhaps a more feasible way is to move toward history. Around the time of the publication of "I Have Seen the Blade of Grass" and "The Glorious Years", Sun Pin tried to expand his own dimension in historical coordinates.

"I've Seen blades of grass" and "Brilliant Years" are obviously intended to combine the fate of the characters with the wave of layoffs, and to structure the fate of the individual in the context of the grand era of the wave of layoffs - this may be the inspiration that the post-50s female writers really give to Sun Pin. However, it must be pointed out that if it is not a wave of layoffs, but other forms of work setbacks, the meaning of the novel will still not be diminished. Compared with the ups and downs of personal fate in the era, the novel is obviously more impressive than the gender relationship in it, and the gender relationship refers to the construction of the subject.

If Liang Shanshan in "Brilliant Years" can be placed in the sequence of female characters created by Sun Pin in the early days, then Li Tianxing in "I Have Seen the Blade of Grass" seems to be difficult to include. However, if you carefully examine, it is not difficult to find that the male character of Li Tianxing always repeats a certain situation of Sun Pin's female character. Li Tianxing wandered around the beds of different women, and one day found that the husband of one of the women was a policeman, and "the muzzle of the smoke was facing them grimly", and behind the muzzle of the gun, it was obviously an inescapable gaze. Unconsciously, Li Tianxing entered the scene of being gazed at, and although the real muzzle did not appear, it was always the absent presence in this rhyme. When Li Tianxing and the director secretly had an affair, the so-called "obedience order" and "reasonable" obeyed the strong and weak order contained in the company's hierarchy, and the strength and weakness of gender relations have always been "reasonable" with "male strong and female weak".

Li Tianxing, who occupies a man's body, is always in a "female" situation. Through the position occupied by Li Tianxing, we can truly see the position of "women" as a gender in the construction of culture and subjectivity. How to break this position is not only about women, but also about all people in the female position.

As far as the existing creative process is concerned, Sun Pin's attempt to expand his self-dimension to history did not last long, which may reflect the dilemma of expanding his own meaning in this dimension. Compared with the relationship between the self and some grand structure unfolding in the historical scene, Sun Pin is perhaps more inclined and better at excavating within the self.

Three

In recent years, Sun Pin seems to be pursuing a kind of writing that "transcends gender.". Marked by the publication of "Fish in the Middle of the Water" in 2019, the subsequent "Garden Tour", "Heavenly Creature Market", "We Ride the Whale Away", and "In the Name of Birds and Beasts" can be attributed to the same kind. Other works, such as "Celestial Poetry", although centered on female figures, gender is no longer an important factor in character shaping, and similar "White Tapir Nocturnal Walk", although closely related to Sun Pin's early female-centered creations, the central figure shaped by literature and labor, Concelin, is obviously beyond the scope of gender; "We Ride the Whale" also writes about gender relations in a small amount of ink, but that relationship seems to appear more as a power relationship, and gender is only its form. As Sun Pin said in the survey of "the relationship between gender concept and literary creation", "After all, there are not only men and women in the world, not only the gender difference, the world is too vast and too vast, the mountains, seas, grasslands and lakes, thousands of years of civilization are still towering on the earth." If a writer continues to write but is always stuck in that bit of gender writing, this kind of writing will look more boring and thin. ”

A particularly prominent change in these novels is the introduction of first-person narratives. The "I" in "Fish in the Middle of the Water", "Garden", "Heavenly Creature Ruins", and "We Ride Away with Whales" all have a clear understanding of their own spiritual situation, and going to abandoned lead mines, hidden gardens, mountains and forests, and islands cannot be simply seen as escaping from the present world, but shows that the writer chooses to keep a certain distance from the whole society when dealing with self-problems through characters. Moreover, unlike the female characters in the early creations who always establish themselves by dealing with the words and deeds of men and others, the actions and pursuits of "I" in these novels have absolute self-consciousness.

Another more obvious change is that literature, or culture in the broader sense, has replaced gender relations as an important way of constructing subjectivity. Interestingly, the reading hobby of "I" in "Fish in the Middle of the Water" enriches the soul above the abandoned lead ore, The luster of Kang Xilin in "The Poetry of celestial bodies" and Li Xiaoyan in "White Tapir Night Walk" comes from the charm of literature, and the ancient artifacts in "Heavenly Objects" extend the thickness of the image of Lao Yuan, and these works are affirming the possibility of literary and cultural construction subjectivity. However, the truth of the artist in "The Garden" is directly enchanted by art, and it seems to be dismantling this possibility again. Or perhaps, Sun Pin is quite wary of literature and art that is completely isolated from social reality.

It's just that, in consciously transcending gender writing, a structure that belongs to historical women inadvertently emerges. Simply put, the connection between the characters and society in these works is absolute but weak, just as women in history are related to society, but this connection is not only recently proposed, but also the interpretation of specific relationships is still insufficient. "Fish in the Middle of the Water", "We Ride the Whale Away", "Heavenly Creature Market", "Garden", do not set the space as an enclave, nor isolate the characters in an enclave, but let the characters and the main action space always maintain a weak relationship with the whole society.

The common question faced by Sun Pin's characters and women in history is, when the individual is not directly organized into a grand social structure, what is the relationship between the individual and society? Is it possible to create an appropriate distance between individuals and society, which seem loose but are actually tense? Is it possible for an individual to benefit society? Is it possible for society to provide some room for individuals to stretch? That is, on the basis of common questions, the answers to women's questions are expected to provide ideas for dealing with the current relationship between individuals and society, and truly take women as a position and method.

Only one-eighth of the iceberg floats on the surface. Gender as an analytical method may play a role like one-eighth of the iceberg. There is an open-minded and insurmountable presupposition that supports the excavation of the remaining seven-eighths of the iceberg – that gender is fluid, that gender cannot disappear, that it can only exist in other guises. The charm of novel creation lies in the fact that it cannot be bound by knowledge and ideas. This suggests that we should try to give writers a relaxed creative environment, from the judgment of the writer's gender concept to the analysis of the gender problem of the work.

exegesis:

[1] Sun Pin, "Women and Women, Women Writers and Female Writers", Literary and Art Controversy, No. 4, 2016.

[2] Zhang Li, "The Relationship between Gender Concept and Contemporary Literary Creation", Modern Chinese Literature Research Series, No. 2, 2020.

[3] In the Lüliang Mountains, it is a phenomenon in which women use their bodies to obtain material materials to support their families.

[4] See Humble Work, "The Invisible Woman in Sun Pin's Novels: From the Narrative Mode of Sun Pin's Novels", Appreciation of Masterpieces, No. 12, 2016.

[5] Chizuru Ueno, Misogyny: Female Disgust in Japan, translated by Wang Lan, Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 2015, pp. 3-10.

[6] Sun Pin, "I've Seen the Blade of Grass", Harvest, No. 3, 2016.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 1, 2022

Responsible Editor | He Ziying Xiong Mengrou

▲Yan Dongfang |

Dongfang Yan, Ph.D. in Literature, is a postdoctoral fellow jointly trained by Hangzhou Normal University and Central South University. He has published many critical articles in newspapers and periodicals such as "Studies in Contemporary Chinese Literature", "Yangtze River Literary and Art Review", and "Literature and Art Daily".